Re-Imagining Software Visualization for Spec-Driven Development
1 — Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
2 — Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
This is the preprint (author) version. It has been accepted for publication at ICSME 2026 but has not yet been through final copyediting or typesetting. The definitive version will appear in IEEE Xplore — please cite the published version once it is available.
Spec-Driven Development (SDD) is reshaping AI-assisted software engineering by elevating natural-language specifications to first-class artifacts that developers author, review, and evolve as deliberately as code. Yet specifications are still handled as flat, unstructured text, even as they grow into large, densely interconnected repositories of requirements, design decisions, and constraints. This is precisely the comprehension problem that motivated software visualization for source code two decades ago. In this paper, we argue that visualization metaphors should not stop at the code boundary and propose a framework to visualize SDD projects. We organize the framework into five levels of techniques, progressing from understanding the structure and quality of individual specifications, to their internal relationships, their traceability to generated code, their coevolution over time, and finally integrated workspaces that support complex tasks. We also outline the open research challenges each level raises, sketching a research agenda for the community.
- Spec-Driven Development
- SDD
- Software Visualization
- Software Comprehension
- Software Evolution
G. Rosa, M. Linares-Vásquez, and G. Robles, “Re-Imagining Software Visualization for Spec-Driven Development,” Proc. IEEE International Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT), 2026, to appear.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{rosa2026specviz,
author = {Rosa, Giovanni and
Linares-V\'{a}squez, Mario and
Robles, Gregorio},
title = {Re-Imagining Software Visualization for
{Spec-Driven} Development},
booktitle = {Proc. IEEE International Working Conference on
Software Visualization (VISSOFT)},
year = {2026},
note = {To appear}
}